“Africa at its Best”

by zunguzungu

Peter suggested in comments to that last post that the Euro-settler vision of what Africans wanted from independence — basically, indolence and bodily pleasure — was not dissimilar to what those very settlers wanted when they were busily displacing Africans and forcing them to work on their coffee plantations and so forth: indolence and bodily pleasure. A propos of that, this, from an interview with Izak Dineson in 1956:

INTERVIEWER: You must have known Africa at its best. What made you decide to go?

DINESEN: When I was a young girl, it was very far from my thoughts to go to Africa, nor did I dream then that an African farm should be the place in which I should be perfectly happy. That goes to prove that God has a greater and finer power of imagination than we have. But at the time when I was engaged to be married to my cousin Bror Blixen, an uncle of ours went out to Africa big-game hunting and came back all filled with praise of the country. Theodore Roosevelt had been hunting there then, too; East Africa was in the news. So Bror and I made up our minds to try our luck there, and our relations on both sides financed us in buying the farm, which was in the highlands of Kenya, not far from Nairobi. The first day I arrived there, I loved the country and felt at home, even among unfamiliar flowers, trees, and animals, and changing clouds over the Ngong hills, unlike any clouds I had ever known. East Africa then was really a paradise, what the Red Indians called “happy hunting grounds.” I was very keen on shooting in my young days, but my great interest all through my many years in Africa was the African natives of all tribes, in particular the Somali and the Masai. They were beautiful, noble, fearless, and wise people. Life was not easy running a coffee plantation. Ten thousand acres of farmland, and locusts and drought . . . and too late we realized that the table land where we were located was really too high for raising coffee successfully. Life out there was, I believe, rather like eighteenth-century England: one might often be hard up for cash, but life was still rich in many ways, with the lovely landscape, dozens of horses and dogs, and a multitude of servants.

The fact that she’s giving that interview during the Mau Mau emergency is what’s behind that “Africa at its best” nonsense; in the early summer of 1956, Dedan Kimathi was still at large, but the scorched earth / concentration camp tactics the British used had defeated Mau Mau militarily only at unthinkable human costs to the African populations, so there was very little that was “happy” about these particular hunting grounds at that particular time. But clearly, Africa “at its best” is a place with a lovely landscape and lots of animals to ride, shoot, and exploit for their labor on your coffee plantation: indolence and bodily pleasure.

One of the most telling passages in that interview is when she singles out the Maasai and Somali as her favorite natives; not, for example, the Gikuyu who she had most contact with (because they did all the labor on her farm), but the natives who could be described using “noble savage” tropes and analogies to “Red Indians.” The laboring natives she prefers not to think too much about; the ones that exercise her imagination with their beautiful nobility are the ones. Here, my thinking is completely dependent on work done by people like Patrick Wolfe in thinking through how specific forms of colonial practice get replicated at the level of ideological fantasy. In short, the argument would be that while one kind of racial fantasy is necessary to describe a native whose labor you seek to exploit, settler colonialists — who only want the native’s land — will produce a totally different sort. Here’s a nice bit of Wolfe’s argument from “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race”:

In Australia, although Aboriginal people are called black, they are not ideologically credited with a natural sense of rhythm. Conversely, unlike Aborigines, black Americans have not figured as a dying race. Rather, this latter condition has been the ideological preserve of red Americans. In this, as in many other respects, popular representations of black Australians and red Americans have distinctly resembled each other, while both have contrasted sharply with popular representations of black Americans. Thus more is involved than discourses of color or nationality.

In Australia and in the United States, white authorities have generally accepted—even targeted—indigenous people’s physical substance (synecdochically represented as blood) for assimilation into their own stock. In both countries, indigenous people have asserted criteria other than blood quanta as bases for group membership and identity. When it has come to black people’s physical substance, on the other hand, it has only been in the last few decades that U.S. authorities have dispensed with the most rigorous procedures for insulating the dominant stock. Moreover, with some exceptions, black groups in the United States have themselves affirmed the “one-drop rule,” maintaining an inclusive membership policy that, apart from anything else, has kept up group numbers…

There are no grounds for assuming that such striking disparities can be reconciled under a single master category called “race.” …American Indians and Aboriginal people in Australia share much more than the quality of attracting assimilation policies. Above all, they are both sets of peoples whose territorial expropriation was foundational to the colonial formations into which Europeans incorporated them. Thus their relationship with their colonizers—as both parties to the relationship would presumably agree—centered on land. In contrast, blacks’ relationship with their colonizers—from the colonizers’ point of view at least—centered on labor. In this light, the varying miscegenation policies make immediate sense, since assimilation reduces an indigenous population with rival claims to the land, while an exclusive strategy enlarges an enslaved labor force.

Someone like Dinesen, in other words, is likely to regard the natives on whose labor she’s dependent differently than how she regards the people on whose land she’s dependent. One of the things that’s complicated about colonial Kenya was that while the Maasai were categorically displaced from their land and romanticized as “the Cherokee of East Africa” — precisely because they could be imagined as being utterly unwilling to be assimilated (and therefore safely and happily doomed to tragic extinction) — the Gikuyu were a laboring population on which the white settlers were parasitically dependent. To analogize to the American context — as the founders of the Kenyan settler state explicitly did — the Maasai were like the Plains Indians (who were imagined to sort of magically disappear as soon white people rolled up), while the Gikuyu were more like the way African-Americans looked to post-civil war white Americans: good to have around for working on plantations, but kind of creepy when they started wearing suits, getting educated, and getting anywhere near “our women.” People like Dinesen loved the Masai; if you imagine them as a doomed pastoralist people who are intrinsically unable to adapt to modernity, then you don’t need to feel bad about taking their land. It’s just Darwin and stuff, right? They’re just too different than you and I. Pity they’ll have to go, but that’s the Law Of Nature. But while the Maasai supposedly had no desire to modernize, the Gikuyu were quite keen to take up education, progress, modernity, and all that stuff, which bugged the shit out of people like Dinesen and had to be suppressed and forgotten.

Instead of romanticizing the Gikuyu, Dinesen writes this sort of thing in Out of Africa:

Part of the farm was native forest, and about one thousand acres were squatters’ land, what they called their shambas. The squatters are Natives, who with their families hold a few acres on a white man’s farm, and in return have to work for him a certain number of days in the year. My squatters, I think, saw the relationship in a different light, for many of them were born on the farm and their fathers before them, and they very likely regarded me as a sort of superior squatter on their estates.”

Other than the “superior” part of it, um, you think? What does one say about this sort of thing, I wonder. Susan Hardy Aiken’s book Izak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative suggeststhat:

by persistently inviting us not only to see Africans through the narrators eyes, but to try to imagine seeing Europeans through Africans’ eyes, Dinesen attempts to expose that Eurocentric “error of vision,” repudiating the power of the all-consuming imperial gaze that would reduce Africans indiscriminately to the status of inert Other or appropriate them as mere signs within an occidental discourse.

To which I say, EARLY NINETIES POSTCOLONIALISM FAIL. A lot of the lady-settlers (Elspeth Huxley, too) get this kind of treatment, where not being quite as bad as the stereotypical Evil Colonialist Man means you’re somehow exposing Eurocentrism or something (and being a woman means you‘re the good kind of white settler). But it all depends on a highly unrealistic notion of what Evil Bad Colonialists were like; an awful lot of them were like Dinesen: human beings who worked hard to make a good life on top of the bad lives they forced people of different skin colors to live. Gillian Whitlock, in The Intimate Empire, puts it much better:

The notion that possession might be forfeited or renegotiated with indigenous peoples is not on the horizon, although Blixen is aware of herself as an interloper. Much has been made of the fact that Blixen individualizes black Africans; for example, they are named as characters in Out of Africa. Yet the operation of racism in Kenyan settler polemics is not to deny the presence of African people but to deny them integrity, authority and agency. The Africa peoples are ’available’ and ’to hand’ for the settler project, and in need of white leadership.

Anyway, time to wrap this post up. I’ll just leave you with this last little amazing tidbit about Dinesen’s past, which I didn’t know:

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your father.

DINESEN: He was in the French army, as was my grandfather. After the Franco-Prussian War, he went to America and lived with the Plains Indians in the great middle part of your country. He built himself a little hut and named it after a place in Denmark where he had been very happy as a young man—Frydenlund (“Happy Grove”). He hunted animals for their skins and became a fur trader. He sold his skins mostly to the Indians, then used his profits to buy them gifts. A little community grew up around him, and now Frydenlund is, I believe, the name of a locality in the state of Wisconsin. When he returned to Denmark, he wrote his books. So you see, it was natural for me, his daughter, to go off to Africa and live with the natives and after return home to write about it.

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10 Comments to ““Africa at its Best””

The final bit is amazing and also suggests the need for projects on comparative and inter-woven colonialisms. While there is some historical work tracing histories of colonial settlers–those who moved from South Africa and India to Kenya, for instance–we don’t really have a conceptual account that tracks how such movement shaped the kind of multiplicity you map here.

Carol Martin Shaw was really great in getting me to think about how tropes of sexuality function–the Maasai men may have been hypersexual, but Gikuyu men were considered neuter, in part because many men worked as domestic servants (my paternal grandfather was a cook). This has textured how I think about histories of race and sexuality.

I remember reading the footnotes about ‘Chinese’ Gordon dying in Sudan, and I was like ‘woah, the dude also was in China?’ There was a lot of cross-pollination amongst British imperial armies, and I imagine settlers moved around a bit as well. Now that I think about it, you could probably find extended families (clans?) of people with wanderlust, going from one place with appropriate white-people weather to another…

I’m unsure how Dinesen fits into the diss, but Lake and Reynolds’ Drawing the Global Color Line is my key to thinking through how the America’s were a model for settler colonialismt (and vice versa), even though they don’t really talk about Kenya at all. If you see how people in South Africa and Australia looked at the American West and Reconstruction, it’s a lot easier to dig up those moments where people like Charles Eliot are talking about British East Africa as America, or Delamere compares settelr plantations to the American south. Filling in that argument is what I’m trying to do from the american side (how TR sees America in Kenya, etc)

And yeah, the hypersexuality of the Masai — emphatically still today — makes a lot more sense when they’re seen as a wild and untamed masculinity; the Gikuyu, on the other hand, are both neutered by being domesticated and their fecundity has to be dis-imagined, since it threatens the organic narratives of settler reproduction.

I forgot about Chinese Gordon. Another favorite of mine is that the general who lost the american revolution for the British was given British India as his next assignment. And James Belich makes the argument in Replenishing the Earth that a big part of what made Anglo-settlers so effective was that you had multi-stage settler societies; the American scotch-irish, for example, were Scots who moved to Ireland first and then moved to North America; he argues that having already been immigrants once made such people particularly effective settlers, and that the Anglo-British empire had a lot of such people. Certainly within the colonial service, you have an awful lot of Anglo-Indians who go to Kenya (as well as Anglo-Indians who go to South Africa *then* Kenya).

It’s fascinating to see this fleshed out a little bit. I’m increasingly coming around to the view that colonial and settler adventures were as much about economies of desire as they were about economies of extraction and pillage. It’s not surprising that the about-to-be-displaced settlers projected their desires on their soon-to-be-liberated subjects.

As to my mention of Fanon – I was (re)reading him last month for a postcolonial book group. While people tend to focus on his views on violence and revolution, I got a lot more interested in what he was saying about founding a post-colonial state and society. His aim is for Africans to conceive of and practice their own Utopias, but he’s quite aware of the ways in which colonial ideas can weigh on the brains of the living like a nightmare. (The fact that many postcolonial states ended up employing the divide-bribe-and-rule system of “tribal” politics that originated under colonialism is a sad example, as are the conspicuous consumption and education patterns of new African elites.)

It’s also intriguing that you tie this settler economy of desire into a conceptual divide between “tradition” and “modernity”, with groups being divided up between those that were “nobly dying out” (because their land was needed for settler farms) and those that were “living in squalor” (because their labour was needed cheaply). (You’ve rightly expressed unease with the modernity/tradition divide – your post on cowrie shells was fantastic – and I would agree with the added recommendation of Susan Buck-Morss’s book on Islamism, Thinking Past Terror.)

I think that the interesting part here is what happens when the “noble savages” refuse to accept his or her fate – how does a settler society react to that? I mean, in the US and Australia people generally completely fail to remember that indigenous groups have stuck around on the margins. For years Australia had a policy of confiscating Aboriginal children and raising them in orphanages, with the explicit goal of bleaching them out. In late-1800s NZ, it was commonly assumed that the Maori would die out and remain only as “a slight golden tinge” on Kiwi faces – except for the inconvenient fact that they didn’t.

I mean, this really fucks up your historical narrative, your entire economy of desire! There’s a small museum dedicated to one of my ancestors, a land judge in NZ in the 1840s or so, and a creek and road named after another, a homesteader in the far North. That shit starts looking real strange when the descendants of the original owners of the land are still around and looking for restitution.

One of the interesting challenges of living in the land of my kauheke is to see it as continuous with, rather than disjunct from, my African childhood. So thanks for the reminder.

as were as much about economies of desire as they were about economies of extraction and pillage.

That’s well put, and nicely frames one of the arguments of one of my chapters: that whereas people like Churchill in the colonial office in the 1920’s saw imperialism through the model of extract and exploit established in the 1880’s, the settlers in Kenya were trying to escape from economics and knew it, and that’s why their behavior is irrational in economic terms (and that’s essentially why Britain was willing to give up Kenya when they did; settler agriculture didn’t pay, and the claims of affective community weren’t strong enough to sustain it after WWII and Mau Mau).

what happens when the “noble savages” refuse to accept his or her fate

Do you know Lear’s Radical Hope? Such a smart read on this problem.

One of the interesting challenges of living in the land of my kauheke is to see it as continuous with, rather than disjunct from, my African childhood.

I might go and track down Radical Hope in a month or two – once I’ve got grant applications and chapters 1 and 2 out of the way.

As for the continuity between Nigeria and NZ – I’ve never written about this directly, although now that you’ve planted the seed I probably will. There are obviously vast differences between the two places – wealth, poverty, space, political structure, etc – which obscure some of the shared problems. As a semipro political theorist, I tend to look at this issue in terms of the challenge of founding. (I’m particularly partial to Arendt’s take in On Revolution.) Both places are still in thrall to colonial ideologies. Rich Nigerians drive Rolls Royces and school their children at British boarding schools; the New Zealand government fills itself with migrants from UK ministries and spent the 1980s and 90s importing Chicago School plans. There are of course many successful attempts to develop indigenous ideas, especially in the cultural realm, but the overall story is of countries still trying to cut their umbilical cords.

I raised this point in the postcolonial reading group, which is largely pakeha. When I asked whether Frantz Fanon was relevant to contemporary New Zealand, the others spent a bit of time discussing some problems facing Maori and Pasifika, and then went back to talking about Africa. I found it ironic that in a discussion of how best to show solidarity with postcolonial subjects nobody grappled with the possibility that we too might be postcolonial!

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